Indy

Introduced in 1993, the Indy was the fruit of SGI's effort to muscle into the market for desktop publishing, low-end CAD, and multimedia. At the time, the market was mostly dominated by Apple. more...

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The Indy was the first computer to include a digital video camera, and was built with a (then) forward-looking architecture including an on-board ISDN adapter. With the inclusion of analog and digital I/O, SCSI, and standard composite and S-Video inputs, the Indy really was a multimedia machine.

At the beginning of its life, the Indy came standard with 16MB of RAM. IRIX 5.1, the first OS for the Indy, did not take full advantage of the hardware due to inadequate memory management. SGI realized this and quickly increased the base specification to 32 MB, at considerable cost. Subsequent IRIX releases made huge improvements in memory usage. The latest release of IRIX available for the Indy workstations is 6.5.22.

Physical characteristics

The Indy packed a reasonable amount of power into a very small (41 cm × 36 cm × 8 cm), simple, and elegant package. The sturdy, electric-blue colored \"pizza box\" chassis is comparable to a small desktop PC from the same era, and is designed to fit underneath a large CRT monitor.

One option for the Indy was a floptical drive. The floptical used 21 MB disks, but was also able to read and write standard magnetic floppies as well.

Processors

Indy's motherboard has a socket for the Processor Module (PM). Early Indys used the 100 MHz MIPS R4000 CPU, which quickly proved inadequate. The Indy, at the bottom of SGI's price list, thus became the primary platform for MIPS's low-cost, low-power-consumption R4600 CPU series. The R4600 had impressive integer performance, but had poor floating-point capability. This, however, wasn't too huge of a problem in a box that was generally not designed for floating-point-intensive applications. For this reason, the R4600 made an appearance outside the Indy line just once, and only briefly, in the SGI Indigo2. This series of CPU issues, along with the relatively low-powered graphics boards, lower maximum RAM amount, and relative lack of internal expansion ability compared to the SGI Indigo led to the Indy being pejoratively described amongst industry insiders as \"An Indigo without the 'go'.\"

The R4600 chip itself has no L2 cache controller, external controller was used to add 512K of L2 cache. R4600s processor modules both with an L2 cache (SC) and without (PC) are common in the Indy. At the same clock rate, the SC version of the processor module is generally 20 to 40 percent faster than the PC version, due to the memory cache.

The Indy was also the first SGI to utilize the MIPS R5000 CPU, which offered significant advantages over the R4400 and R4600 it replaced. The Indy's 180 MHz R5000 module can be overclocked to 200 MHz by replacing its crystal oscillator chip.

Read more at Wikipedia.org